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September 13, 2017

Industry

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Why can you only watch the iPhone X launch on a Apple device?

Like thousands of people worldwide, the Stream7 team were all set to watch the Apple iPhone launch on Tuesday, Sept 12. But logging on to the website using our browser of choice Google Chrome, we found out we could not watch the stream.

After some research we noticed that the stream could only watched using an iPhone, iPad, Mac (Safari only), Apple TV or Windows 10 PC (Edge browser only). As a company who specialises in Event Streaming, we considered why a company would want to lock out viewers who are not already using their products?

According to StatCounter in August 2017, Chome had a 54.89% Browser Market Share Worldwide, compared to only 14.88% for Safari, therefore Apple missed out on marketing to a huge percentage of potential new customers.

Online research shows that Apple historically restricts streams of its events to Apple users, giving them the first look at the latest tech offerings, but in a era where online live video attracts huge audiences and potential new customers, could this be a foolhardy move?